Shvarts Mikhail Yakovlevich (1903, Minsk ― 18.08.1938, Gandesa, Spain) ― leader of a Komsomol organization in Riga, participant in the Spanish Civil War.
He was born into the well-off family of merchant Yankel-Meyer and Feyga Shvarts, who had three children.
In Minsk he began attending school, but the First World War interrupted his studies. The family was evacuated to Moscow.
In 1919 he completed secondary school (gymnasium).
Together with a group of gymnasium students he took part in school literary circles.
In 1921 he moved with his family to Daugavpils. In 1922 he left with his sister for Czechoslovakia, where he enrolled at the Prague Polytechnic University. He took an active part in the work of revolutionary circles. In 1926 he joined the Communist Youth League of Czechoslovakia, and conducted propaganda work among Czech youth.
In Czechoslovakia he met his future wife ― Elena Gdalyevna (Grigoryevna) Khidekel, and in 1929 their daughter Yevgenia was born.

After graduating from the institute, he returned to Latvia, and became a member of the Communist Party of Latvia. He was arrested twice for revolutionary propaganda. After 15 May 1934 he was forced to emigrate to Czechoslovakia, where he published in the party press under the pseudonym “German.”
In December 1936, together with the first Czech volunteers, he made his way to Spain. For a month and a half he was at the disposal of the personnel administration of the International Brigades in Albacete, under the name Egon Schmidt. On 8 February 1937 he was appointed political commissar of an engineer unit of the 15th International Brigade. For his part in the fighting at Jarama he was given the rank of lieutenant. On 13 March 1937 he was wounded.
In the hospital he studied Spanish, and wrote the poem “Verses of a Citizen of Europe.” On 20 May 1937 he returned to the brigade, and was appointed commander of an engineer company. He took part in the Brunete operation, and in the capture of several towns ― Quinto, Belchite, Fuentes de Ebro. He became a captain, and was appointed political commissar of an officers' school. In March 1938, after the school was disbanded, he returned to the 15th International Brigade and commanded an engineer company.
On 18 August 1938, together with two comrades, he set out for brigade headquarters with an urgent dispatch, and was killed not far from Gandesa, where he was also buried. A monument was erected in his honor, with a memorial plaque reading: “He fell in the battles for the Sierra de Pándols.”
His wife Elena was one of the editors of the book “Fighters of Latvia in Spain.”

Lit.: Fighters of Latvia in Spain. 1936―1939. Memoirs and Documents. Riga: “Liesma,” 1970

I. Rochko

E. Vater